Chapter 73

 

 

I awoke feeling refreshed somehow. But I’m still very excited. It’s like my heart is pounding too, since I’d woken up right before I could be pushed down by Sunghee’s aggressiveness. Dang it. If only I could have been with them just a bit longer…or should I have been?

Nothing happened...but only because we’d run out of time. Dream states are weird like that.

I feel guilty because I was conflicted. Inside I actually wanted to go all the way with Sunghee. But did I love her and did she love me? Would it screw up being with Asakura? What if Asakura found out I wanted Sunghee too? I can’t have both can I?

Hmm, but I can’t throw either of them away even more than that. This world is too harsh. The only alternative is to keep them both. But I have to make sure that neither of them finds out I’m with the other right?

It’s complicated.

I find myself waking up as I worry about working it out. I’m looking up at the ceiling of the tent.

Is it the added effects of the Demon Box and the Dreamweaver skill that’s made me feel completely rested? Because my sleep is tied to the others I feel good even though I’ve slept in an awkward under siege position.

We’re in a small tent that the dwarves have lent us. It’s complete with a ground cloth inside it and we’ve got a blanket to share between us. I did notice Asakura is curled up against me. It makes me not want to wake up.

Unfortunately though, Rina is also in the tent so we didn’t get any private time before we went to sleep.

“Oh you’re awake. I was going to get you up,” Asakura nods cheerfully. She’s trying to be cheerful but it’s kind of forced because of the feeling of our being trapped underground. She is also using my arm for a pillow. It’s natural though since we’ve become closer.

She leans closer to me. I feel her breasts push into my chest. Without trying somehow our legs are intertwined too. Of course I think part of the night we’d slept like that. But now I’ve started to be overly conscious about it. Camping almost seems fun now, even though we’re on a different world.

It seems unreal. How could something this wonderful happen to me? I wouldn’t have imagined this a year earlier.

But in spite of it we’re both a little gun shy on exploring each other. Sometimes we’ve caught each other blushing just staring at each other.

I wanted to reach under her shirt and grab her wonderfully big boobs, but after what happened with Sunghee and Fox I’m afraid it will spin out of control. Is it just me? Her breasts...they look kind of swollen even more than they already were.

“You know you don’t have to be afraid of touching me? We are together you know. This is a real relationship not a fling. Don’t be afraid,” Asakura whispered with big eyes.

Slowly she takes my hand and very slowly pulls it around her waist. We lay there looking at each other for a long time, just appreciating the warmth we feel together. Slowly she pushes my hand under her blouse.

I’m a bit afraid but she doesn’t know why. But she can see I have reservations.

“It’s OK Shun. This is what married people do.” She gently pushes my hand around her waist and I can feel the smooth silky warm skin of her waist on direct skin. I don’t fight to touch more than just the back of her waist. It’s still very exciting because from this position I could roam freely up or down. Is that what she wants me to do? I gently massage and rub her back against her skin directly.

“You sleep so deeply. I wish you would stay awake and talk to me after Rina goes to sleep next time,” she said.

“Really?” I felt my heart skip a beat. I’m wondering what it means.

“Yeah, it’ll be fun.” She leans in and kisses me on the lips before I can object or stop her. A kiss on the lips is really bad. The pheromones will activate that way for sure.

“We better start getting up,” I said forcing myself up despite her upset protests. She is frowning. There may have been some effect already since she was against me all night.

She glances at Rina, who is still asleep. “Please, just a bit longer?”

It’s also nice that we’ve got a place to sleep and that we aren’t directly on the dirt cavern floor anymore.

We let Rina sleep a few more minutes. The dwarves are confused by this and why she’s not doing as much, but because of the language barrier I can’t explain it. While she’s asleep I give her the treatment. It amazes me how often I’ve had to be doing it. I’m sure it’s been at least a twice a day thing.

Of course Asakura is pleading with me to lay back down and hold her. If the pheromones go out of control next to the dwarves they will know something strange is going on though. So we have to stop. I don’t want to risk it, even though it’s very tempting.

I clean up and wash my face next to the pool with Asakura hanging onto my arm half the time. She cleans up too. We feel refreshed after awhile. The water isn’t polluted or cloudy with filth now that they have already cleaned out the goblin blood. But it’s still too icy cold to bathe in fully like a hot spring.

It’s also great that my mana is rebuilding itself so quickly. When I concentrate on it, it seems like it’s an even better rate of growth. It’s kind of like the mental version of when you want to stretch and your body muscles feel so tight that they are ready to burst. With Asakura we both meditate and do morning exercises. I doubt it has any effect but I have her do the exercises with me. It will still help her in other ways I think, but just not make her a mage.

Then we proceed to treat the next ten dwarves that have the worst wounds. I don’t heal them to full health because I have to be careful of mana, but still the dwarves are impressed. A lot of them have their wounds almost reduced to minor scratches.

This time I’m thinking I may need mana for battle situations today. So there were several reasons for holding back.

However, I’m starting to see what Fox and Sunghee meant by the goblins having poison after thinking about it. It seems that the dwarves are mostly immune to poisons, which is why we didn’t notice it; however on an open wound of an older dwarf veteran that may be well past his prime that I’m treating I can’t help but notice a few of these have a few of the dwarves wounds which are much more swollen than others. There’s discoloration too.

Perhaps because this dwarf seemed older than the others the discoloration and swelling is more noticeable than with others. And perhaps being older his immune system was weaker than the other dwarves? Now if it were human anatomy I’m sure we’d react more strongly, but because they are dwarves things are different. Also another heads up that the poison was real was that the other dwarves were very alarmed when I almost touched the poisoned areas.

It seems like they were worried about the poison affecting me too.

Is this the effects of goblin poison?

To be safe I use the cure disease on each wound that looks like this or that looks like it might fester. It doesn’t cost much mana to use this type of spell so whenever possible I take advantage of it. I used it more than once on anyone I suspected to have it because I’m still learning how it works. I also don’t know immediately if just one cast will fully clear out all the poison or only clear a small area. Then I have to go back over each victim suspected of poison after that to make sure how much of it I’ve gotten rid of.

Sometimes I have to do this procedure more than once. It’s also very fortunate that most of the dwarves are naturally resistant to the poison.

I also notice Asakura goes everywhere with me now. She’s always just like a step behind my left shoulder. We’re pretty much inseparable; she was often with me before but this is like to a whole new level. It’s a nice feeling actually to have someone there with me that isn’t Rina. I can also pick her mind on stuff and she’s good at figuring out possible meanings behind things and bouncing ideas off each other. Still, sometimes I bump into her because when I’m doing stuff she wants to touch me, and then when I suddenly move we’re pushed into each other.

I was a little bit embarrassed though when she even wanted me to follow her to guard her when she had to go pee.

“What don’t you want to look?” she asked when I’m in front of her. I’m facing the other way but can hear liquid in a steady stream pouring on the ground. She seems disappointed that I’m not looking. But I don’t need to see stuff like that.

I’m sure my ears are turning beat red.

“Uh, I’m not into stuff like watching people use the bathroom,” I said.

“Oh a gentleman huh, that’s good I like that even more,” she countered, in a husky voice. She’s been acting weird lately.

We both washed our hands further down where the stream emptied elsewhere, while we made small talk. We’re also going through a list of chores that we help the dwarves with. We figured out early on if we just go around volunteering then they are less inclined to assign us a dirty task.

“You know we might have a chance for some private time soon,” Asakura flashed me a smile.

My heart beats in wonder. She’s about to pull me away into a hide away like spot behind some huge boulders when suddenly somehow Rina has found us.

“Oh there you guys are. I had a hard time finding you both. You can’t leave me alone with dwarves!” Rina hissed.

Damn.

How does Rina manage to always have the worst timing?

“They aren’t that bad. They’re nice,” I said remembering all the help they’d been.

“But they are dwarves. A bunch of old midgets with dirty beards,” she protested.

“You sound prejudiced,” I cautioned her.

“I actually like them. They are cool and actually they aren’t ugly but just different,” Asakura interjected.

“I actually think dwarves are kind of cool,” I said.

“Well actually I’m worried about the wounded. Do you think you got all the poison?” Rina asked trying to change the subject.

“Why do you ask?” I asked.

“Do you think they’ll really recover a 100%?” she asked me making sure no dwarves are around. “It’s just so hard to believe that only yesterday some of them were so close to dying.

I shrug, “I can only hope so. But the effects of the heal spell seem to be working. I just hope we got all the poison neutralized and it’s hard to spot it.”

The dwarves have stayed busy during the night cleaning out the spring and its pool but they’ve had a tough time of things. It’s like a never ending fight trying to strain out and purify the spring water now. Some of them look really cold from hauling away dead goblins. I can see the goblins have tried really hard to get in during the night and there’s an overabundance of carcasses.

The dwarves can’t communicate well with us but I can see that every single one of them has had their turn getting wet and trying to explore the cavern below. There’s a long string of them getting warm around the fire.

But it seems that Hrogin fellow expects us to have a turn. I feel a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when I realized it. My heart wavered a little on that as I tried to regroup my courage. It’s one thing to fight goblins, but to fight them in icy cold water is another story entirely.

They can tell Rina isn’t very strong so they don’t make her go. But I’m surprised when they give both me and Asakura the ropes to tie around ourselves and some kind of harpoons, and some individual ropes and tie downs with spikes.

What are they expecting us to do?

They point to the water and say something in Dwarvish I’m really confused.

“Oh, I get it,” Asakura snaps her fingers.

“What?” I said.

“They’re building a water ladder,” she says. “See look at how they’ve used stakes and rope tie downs between them. It’s so you can pull yourself through the water quicker with good speed to get to wherever it leads too.”

Sure enough she’s right.

But that means...trying to cross a certain length underwater with only so much air. It’s dangerous.

The idea is you can use the water ladder on the bottom of the water tunnel and its pool to help pull you along quickly without losing time for slow swimming and fighting against the current. It also helps tell or point the direction to go.

“As long as the other side has air that sounds like a good plan,” I joked sarcastically.

She nodded, “yeah, I’m sure they want it to end up leading to another cavern that we can escape out of.”

“That’s good. It means the dwarves have explored much of where we are supposed to go right?” I asked.

Asakura shrugs. “To be honest, I’m not sure. But I think so. It’s progress at least.”

“But I don’t want you or Rina to go alone without me. It’s too risky and we don’t know how many goblins are around,” I said.

She shrugs, “it can’t be helped. Dwarves are creatures of equality it seems. Even their own leaders have had a turn it looks like. Did you see Hrogin was also wet? He didn’t make exceptions to himself to promote his own survival over the others. We might be able to get away with Rina not having a turn but I’m sure they’ll expect me and you to go.”

“Really?” that surprised me. But it’s good. A system that promotes equality and less social castes is exactly what we need to get started on this world. If we started with nothing on an area or town that has a lot of social classes and poverty we’d never get anywhere. That Hrogin guy just grew really tall in my eyes.

Soon enough our turn comes up. Everyone has to pull their weight. I feel a lot of stress about this. It’s not something I’ve even done anything remotely close to.

Asakura still encourages me. “We’ll get through it. Let’s do it together.” She pats me on the back again. Like before her hand lingers. If nothing else happens, it’s still heavenly just being with her.

She starts getting ready. It means we have to change our clothes. I reduced myself to my boxers and took off my socks and shoes. I save my pants and shirt to keep them dry, since when we get out we need something dry to get into or we’ll get hypothermia. I’m not wearing much now, and I’m sure the water will be cold but it’ll be unbearable if I have to wear wet clothes when I come back. I don’t think it’s really that bad boxers do look like shorts anyway. The only reason people have a hard time with people seeing them is the social perception.

The dwarves give us some kind of water clip shoe. It’s not really a shoe at all, but is designed for the transition of protecting the feet on sharp rocky beaches but still allowing us to swim with spread flat portions like water fins to help swim too. It’s a clever design with refined metal.

The look the dwarves are giving us says they expect us to help out too, and don’t even try to buck the system.

Asakura also takes her clothes off to my astonishment. The dwarves are trying to not stare at her. She is wearing her black lace underwear and her bra still. It mostly covers everything up but leaves no question about her figure and how beautiful she is. She knows also that if she gets her clothes wet, it will be terrible when we come back. But I’m surprised she didn’t argue or put up a fight or tantrum. Instead she stays with me as we get ready.

The dwarves won’t want to help us if we don’t pull our weight either, so we don’t want to argue for an exception for every little thing. After equipping the water clip shoe things we get ready to go.

One of the dwarven lieutenants barks something and they quit staring at Asakura. I feel bad for her, and stay by her protectively. I feel a big temptation to be mad at the dwarves right now.

The dwarves show us and give us a hammer for the water ladder stakes. They also are able to show us how to get the stakes into the ground. Of course while doing so they are embarrassed trying to not see how beautiful Asakura is, and how well shaped her body is.

Shouldn’t they have showed us this before having us get undressed?

I suspect a bad motive. Of course even another race would find ‘glamorous’ Asakura beautiful and want to look at her. I’m frowning, and ready to guard her but they don’t try to do anything. Asakura looks really nervous and scared. But she shows courage, but won’t let me even get a foot away from her.

During the training I find her hand in mine and she sometimes stands directly behind me into my back using me as a sort of barrier. It happens because she doesn’t like them looking at her with their fleeting glances. But to avoid having them see parts of her means she has to literally plaster herself as hard as she can into my back. I feel two big warm mounds pushing into my back with very little cloth in between us and really warm where our skin is in contact with each other.

Now I’m having a hard time not becoming sexually excited and concentrating on what the dwarves want us to do.

It’s obvious she’s taken and so the dwarves start to lose interest mostly, except for a few oddballs. Of course the looks of jealousy to me continue. Their brethren put pressure on them to show more respect finally. Hrogin also gets mad at them for what they did.

Once again the language barrier makes it harder for us.

Then they train us on how to tie the ropes to each other and to each section of the stakes. It can’t be helped that this is going to be worse than fighting orcs and goblins in some ways because we can already tell from the room temperature that this is a freezing cold water pool. That means the whole water tunnel is also freezing cold.

We did have an idea of pre-shaping and pre-knotting and cutting the ropes before going in the water. This helped build trust with the dwarves too. Each rope section now had knots along it for grip plus in addition to that we’ve gotten them to be about twenty feet long.

However, there is just one thing the dwarves did unexpectedly that impressed me. They’d had a fire going in the tunnel and had super heated rocks and put them in a bag of some kind that doesn’t burn. They then are having us carry the heated rocks while we swim, and at the same time using the hot rocks to pull us down quickly to the bottom without losing travel time. It won’t stop the cold very long though is the main problem.

We’re finally satisfied. It will be hard though. We have to somehow get it tied in place and then come back and forth for air while holding our breath. I don’t have a spell yet for holding breath or for some kind of air bubble.

Finally it’s our turn to go.

“I’m kind of scared Shun,” Asakura admits as we get ready to go in the water.

“Me too, but I’m scared of the cold more than the water itself. But we have the best chance if you think about it. The others don’t have my shielding magic...” I stop myself short.

I’d forgotten about my element resistance buff. It could help with buffering the cold.

I cast it for cold resistance on both myself and Asakura in addition to also doing runic shielding. We can still feel cold unfortunately. There’s nothing worse than freezing cold and feeling like you are so cold that your body can’t stop shaking. Because I’d had bad experiences with cold before, this is really hard for me to have the courage to do.

We finally plunge into the deep water of the pool. I found out quickly my movement speed buff doesn’t work underwater. Why is that, I wonder? Does that mean I have to change it to a different spell or version, or is it just because I’ve not ranked it up very much? With some of the spells, some features seemed to unlock at rank tiers.

I’m carrying a bag of heated rocks tied to my waist. We had to be careful before going in the water because the bag is super hot. When we hit the water it sputters and spits. To fight against the cold I would be crazy enough to try it, but there’s no guarantee it’ll work or help much. I have the hammer for hitting the spikes in my right hand while Asakura is carrying two pieces of rope setups attacked to two spikes.

It’s hard to swim because of the bag and the hammer but necessary.

But the problem is the bag of heated rocks loses its heat very quickly. They sizzle and bubble as soon as they hit the water. I was worried about them burning me. It wasn’t a good idea after all. But at least we’d tried experiments to find out different things. We still used the rocks to help us descend the length of the tunnel that flows downward more quickly.

I had to keep a knife on my belt to make sure I could cut the bag loose if it starts to weigh me or Asakura down.

We are fighting shivering cold as we swim down deep. It’s so cold that I feel like if we stop even for a second that I’ll panic.

It’s hard work, even with the dwarves having already gotten rope ladder setups ahead of us. We pull ourselves forward and then find ourselves about sixty feet in with my ears going crazy from the water pressure. We attack and tie the rope’s tail end to the other end of the head spike where their trail ends to extend it some more.

It took all of our air and there aren’t any air pockets down here plus it’s so freaking dark even with my light spell. It turns out my light spell does work underwater, but it is affected somewhat. The light radius is diminished a lot. So that means I’ll have to actively practice how to use it underwater?

We have to high tail it back as quick as possible. The near pitch black dark scares me almost as much as the lack of air pockets. The sheer length of the tunnel and how long it took to get there made it so we were only there a few seconds.

Both of us are terrified of drowning and feel the pressure to go back for air. I left the hammer here this time, since just tying the rope to the end took all our time, even though the dwarves’ had us practice speed tying the same knot before getting in the water. Of course it can’t be helped that tying knots underwater is much worse than tying them above water. When you try it, it’s like your hands feel all clumsy and slow even when you are accustomed to tying knots with rope.

We ran out of air and start pulling ourselves back.

But partway through I can see Asakura starting to panic. She’s desperate for air and her eyes are wide with fear. I am too. It turns out the bag of heated rocks was a bad idea. They’d long gone cold anyway. But they had helped us descend down the tunnel quicker. I cut mine loose and then rush to cut hers off as well. It helped us get back to the surface faster.

She’s crying as we reach the other side. “That was so scary!” she said.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

She hugs me tightly and tries to stay as quiet as possible while getting fresh air. It feels good since both of us aren’t wearing much. But we’re both looking kind of cold and blue in the face.

“I’d rather fight monsters than face cold and drowning,” she sputtered.

“We need to try again,” I said after letting her calm a bit.

“I know. Let’s not stay so long this time though. I know it’s not your fault we’re in this position,” she replied.

The dwarves are sympathetic but they can’t do anything about it. They are in the same position as us.

But does this mean the dwarves can hold their breath longer than humans can? I expect they can, but I’m not sure by how much. Even for them this probably must seem really difficult, I think. They probably don’t swim very good though, since they look like their bodies are denser than ours are.

Asakura needs a few minutes to get her breath and rest before we go back down. She hugs me at the end when we’re still in the water during that whole time. Wow, I never realized how much she likes to touch. I think it’s mostly innocent and different from Sunghee’s lusty nature however. The dwarves want us to finish the job too. We both looked at them for pity and they kept pointing to go back down.

They are signaling more now, thinking we are refusing to go. But it’s just that we’re trying to get our courage back.

“Let’s try again,” Asakura said with chattering teeth.

“You’re ready?” I confirmed.

She nods, “let’s do it.”

I can see Rina nearby watching us and very concerned. She looks cold just watching us look cold; it’s that bad.

The cold element resistance spell helps but damn I hate freaking cold! It doesn’t do much to take the sting off. Somehow Asakura is more courageous than I am about trying to face the cold. She dives down first, and I reluctantly follow.

As we descend I’m swearing in my mind because of how the cold bites into us. It’s agonizing and makes me feel homesick too.

This time we pull ourselves quicker since we don’t have that much to carry. Everything was already at the end where we’d left it. We got there within about fifteen seconds. She re-secures the end of the rope where we’d been at to make sure she did it right and check everything while I go ahead. It takes me another ten seconds to get the stake to its proper position to where the end of the water latter should lead.

I’m already feeling pressure to go back for air almost before we even got there. I’m not much of a sports enthusiast and can’t hold my breath that long. I get the hammer and briefly hammer the spike as best as I can. I only get about five good hits on it before I have to start swimming back. Still, five good hits is a good start.

I’m lucky that I can use the rope water ladder to help pull myself back though because it’s secure.

We move as quickly as we can.

When we get to the end both of us are coughing and spitting up water as we hold each other. This water trap is deadly. I don’t think I would have lasted another two seconds holding our breath. I find Asakura is icy cold and trying to hold onto me for warmth and to get rid of her panic as we broke the surface. If it weren’t so cold I would have also appreciated even more that her lacy fancy underwear from Earth looks see through when wet when standing close to her.

But the job isn’t done. It makes our hearts ache thinking about it.

The dwarves are looking for a signal that we’ve completed our two sections of rope ladder.

We respond by shaking our heads no. When they see our response their faces are full of anguish and fear but they aren’t angry at us, which is good. I can see they don’t like water either. I’d forgotten that in most stories dwarves hate water more than anything. Does that mean they are truly desperate to consider this route?

We decide to go back down and work at it again. We aren’t sure because of the language barrier how many times they even expect us to go, but given the extremely dangerous nature of this work we know that someone would probably have to rest and warm up for quite awhile after even going only three or four times in this type of atmosphere.

This time we work hard and get there really fast but as soon as we got there I could already feel my stamina plummeting. Eight seconds to get there with the help of the rope ladder; it’s worse than I thought. Asakura holds the line of rope and steadies the spike while use both my hands to try to drive it in. I can see her hands panicky and nervous. She fumbles with adjusting the rope for me a couple of times.

Because we’re rushing it, and too conscious of the time limit to be down here, I banged my thumb from missing the spike on the first hit; so painful. Then I couldn’t open my mouth to shout or scream either because that would cause me to lose my air.

I manage to get in six good hits to drive the spike further. But the problem is the ground here is really hard in some places and soft in others. The spike comes lose.

Dammit!

We have taken a major loss in progress. Just getting one spike in alone takes several trips.

We can’t do anything about it. We have to go back for air.

We are desperately breathing hard as we make it to the surface where we came from. I think after going down this many times that the tunnel to the other side is much longer than I thought it was.

“HAAAAAAA.”

“HAAA HAAAAA.”

It feels so good to just be able to breathe as we burst up through the water. For a few seconds we could only hang onto each other on the bank trying to get air.

We feel like collapsing, and we’re hanging onto each other again. If it weren’t so cold or so much like being in hell, I would have appreciated hanging onto Asakura like this; but this situation of bitter needle like cold trying to eat away at us is literally mind breaking.

The dwarves are pleading with us to try again, even though they know we probably can’t take much more of this. I can see many of them are miserable from their own attempts, so I can’t be angry with them.

“You can do it Shun! Asakura keep my bro alive!” Rina said cheering at us from the shore.

Now I know why they gave us two sections of water ladder to do. It’s hard. Before I knew what was going on just doing two rope ladder sections sounded like we were being babied. After you get in the cold water you see how bad it is. It seems the problem is more than just holding our breath. The problem is also trying to get the spike secure. In fact it’s the biggest issue. The spike won’t hold in sand, which is consistent with much of an underground tunnel.

I’m trying to think about how to tackle this problem.

“What are we going to do? The ladder won’t work if we can’t get the spike secure?” Asakura asks.

And we can’t get out of the water until we get it secure either. So either we get the spike secure or both of us will get hypothermia.

I keep reminding myself the dwarves are already in bad shape themselves. But aren’t they trained for cavern exploring?

“I’m thinking about that,” I answered finally.

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Asakura says. She gives me a kiss on the forehead, but I can see in her eyes she feels very worried about it.

No pressure…